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Abstract
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en
In early 2025, increasing numbers of women held positions of formal political power across West Africa. In Ghana, Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang had just been elected vice-president, and in Benin, Mariam Chabi Talata had been vice-president since 2021 (see Alber, this volume). Cabo Verde and Senegal had more than 40 percent women in their national parliaments, and in early 2024, Sierra Leone, Togo, and Cabo Verde had 30 percent or more women serving as cabinet ministers. While at least the tendency of growing numbers sounds promising, countries in East and southern Africa have experienced much higher rates of women in positions of political leadership for many years. Rwanda has led the world in women’s representation in parliament, with more than 50 percent women for two decades, and South Africa and Mozambique have had gender-parity cabinets for many years.1 Most West African countries are still far away from such high representation of women in parliaments, and yet formal political power in institutions such as parliaments and cabinets is only one of the ways in which women use political power to influence the world around them. Women have for centuries used their everyday power, knowledge, and competencies to shape West African politics and society, in formal as well as informal positions and settings (Amoah-Boampong and Agyeiwaa 2021). They have acted as monarchs, merchant queens, pharaohs, queen mothers, and spiritual and religious leaders (Achebe 2020). In so doing, they have defended their interests and those of the people around them, all the while contributing to significant social and political change. Much more recently, after the end of conflicts and military rule in some countries in the region, transitions to democracy have enabled some women to exercise more political power informally. Democratization in Africa has opened up more axes of power by making the state more susceptible to pressure from civil society, as in the media and by traditional [End Page 1] authorities and religious and occupational associations (Waylen 2010).2 Because democratization was accompanied by pressures from outside states and global actors to liberalize economies, some of those interests in civil society were powerful economic actors and enterprises. Thus, democratization opened new pathways and opportunities for women to exercise political power informally, through occupations like trading, or through their gendered roles as mothers and wives. Much of that activity has occurred under the leadership of mobilized local and national women’s organizations and associations (Medie 2016). This special issue, focusing on West Africa, aims to make visible these processes—of the exercise of formal and informal political power, especially by women—and to show how they are related. Combining scholarship on women in formal political office with that on women exercising power in other, more informal ways, we seek to demonstrate a broader understanding of women in West African societies and their multiple, sometimes intersecting, ways of holding and acting out political power. With that, we contribute to the still small literature on elite women on the African continent. We hope this special issue will offer glimpses into historical continuities and ruptures in the complexities of women’s political engagement, inside and outside the formal sphere of politics, as well as indicate avenues for future research. This collection of articles is drawn from presentations made at a workshop of the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA) at the University of Ghana in May 2023. The workshop, which brought together invited scholars from West Africa, Europe, and North America, was organized by a MIASA interdisciplinary fellows’ group, of which the three guest editors were members. The goal of the workshop was to reflect on women’s presence in politics—understood broadly—across West Africa. This overarching theme unites the articles in this special issue, providing readers with a coherent focus but from a rich diversity of narratives.
